Much has been said about Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, some of it quite good, some of it rather virulent. Most of the detractors claim it is not appropriate for children, yet there are several critics who claimed it was one of the best films of 2009, its chief proponent A.O. Scott named it as the 5th best film of the decade.
Without a doubt those expecting a breezy kid’s movie were appropriately gobsmacked, but that makes the finished product all the more impressive. Jonze has said himself that the goal was not to make a movie FOR children, but make a movie about childhood. His previous films have been from scripts by Charlie Kaufman, whose work almost always confronts the very nature of life itself in its own signature, off-key way. Here Jonze does his own writing, and in the process he has taken a simple children’s book about appreciating your parents and turns it into a transcendent film which does what no other film has ever been able to do as well: enter the mind of a child.
Every kid lives in his/her own universe, and they are at the center. Where the Wild Things Are is able to no less than depict a child’s realization of the world around him, and it is done through a fantasy in a world of “wild things”. Max (Max Records) lives with his mother (Catherine Keener) and his sister (Pepita Emmerichs), and nobody (in his mind) seems to be paying him any attention. His sister leaves with her friends all too often, while his mother is dating an unnamed Mark Ruffalo, and Max is left alone to make forts in the snow and in his room. We side with Max because Jonze is brilliant at truly giving us Max’s point of view. Relatively minor events turn into emotional disasters, and Max runs away from home when he feels ignored once too much.
Eventually Max sails across an ocean onto an island populated by creatures, where each has their own, three-dimensional personality. Normally in films of this ilk the creatures would merely be talking heads from which Max learns all the requisite lessons, but here they each represent a different facet of Max’s life. They are voiced by such actors as Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano, Chris Cooper and Lauren Ambrose, but the true representation of Max’s negative attributes is Carol, as voiced by James Gandolfini.
Let’s pretend the story had no emotional depth or resonance, and even then this film is an absolute triumph on a technical level. Jonze creates a world so vivid and beautiful that it could only come from the imagination of a child. The creatures themselves at no point look synthetic, but they appear to be entirely natural beings that have lived together for years. These are some of the most convincing creatures ever put on film, and that is because not only of the realistic animation and costumes, but the writing and voice work as well. If you told me that James Gandolfini would voice the most childish “wild thing”, I would have laughed in your face and said he could only play someone who at any point could pull out a gun and shoot you. Instead, the voiceover work is able to completely join with the characters. At no point to I hear Tony Soprano’s voice, but instead I hear the voice of Carol.
Hollywood has entered a place where only more adult-oriented fare can have a message or important theme, but with one film Jonze has disproven that theory. When people are faced with a film of such shocking ambition, the first reaction can be rather negative. That is what happened here. Just because a film actually takes an honest look at the mind of a child doesn’t make it inappropriate. That reaction is illogical and dangerous. We need more children’s movies like Where the Wild Things Are, and more talents like Spike Jonze, and if people ignore movies like this and instead opt to take their kids to the average, empty children’s fare that litters our theaters, we could be going in a bad direction indeed. Nevertheless, any world where a movie this remarkable can be made and released can’t be all bad.
Rating:
(out of 4)--------
I figured that while I'm on this tangent my next post will be about Jonze's first two films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, both from scripts by Charlie Kaufman. Consider this a quasi Director Profile.
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